Community sharpens focus on preschool

Mark Bugnaski / GazetteKeylin Conner reads as Benjamin Sierra-Torres works with a computer in a preschool class at Kalamazoo's Arcadia Elementary School. There's a growing preschool movement in Kalamazoo County, and the Arcadia class is part of a state-funded program that many would like to see expanded.

KALAMAZOO - Every fall, kindergarten teacher Wanda Burton gets some students who already read a little and some who've never been introduced to the alphabet, some who can write their name and some who've never held a pencil before.

The range can reflect differences in sociodemographics, but another factor is preschool experience, said Burton, who teaches at Kalamazoo's Milwood Elementary School.

After attending a high-quality preschool, some low-income kindergartners "come in as capable as the middle-class kids," Burton said.

But children who start school behind typically stay behind. That's why improving and expanding preschool is critical to ensuring the success of The Kalamazoo Promise and building the area's reputation as the Education Community, Kalamazoo County leaders said.

"I believe that early-childhood education is so important that I'd be willing to fund it by ending public education at age 16," and shift the savings to educating 3- and 4-year-olds, said Ron Fuller, superintendent of the Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency. "That's pretty controversial. But I feel early education is so critical."

Locally, the preschool movement is starting to snowball on various fronts:

MILLIONS FOR PRESCHOOL: Susan Brown, wife of the founder of the Treystar Inc. development firm, is pushing for a multimillion-dollar, privately funded effort to expand and improve the local preschool network.

NEW START FOR HEAD START: Kalamazoo County is overhauling its Head Start program, a key component of the local preschool system.

COORDINATED SERVICES: The county has launched the Great Start Collaborative to coordinate services for children from birth to age 5.

COMMUNITY SUPPORT: Kalamazoo Public Schools Superintendent Michael Rice and other area educators are creating a drumbeat around the importance of early-childhood education.

FAST FACTS

-- Every $1 spent on high-quality preschooling results in an eventual payoff of $2.78 because the spending fosters higher wages for former students and less crime, according to analysis by Tim Bartik, of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

-- Bartik estimates that, long term, universal preschool would add more than 3 million jobs to the U.S. economy, almost $300 billion in annual earnings, almost $1 trillion annually to the Gross Domestic Product and more than $200 billion in annual government tax revenues.

-- Michigan preschoolers in a state-funded program for at-risk 4-year-olds showed literacy gains that were 117 percent higher than gains for students outside the program, according to a 2004 study by Rutgers University.

-- Nationally, about 40 percent of 3- and 4-year-olds from a family with an income of $20,000 to $30,000 attend preschool, compared to 68 percent of those from a family with income over $75,000.

"We're hot on the cusp," said Kristi Carambula, who oversees early-childhood programs for the Kalamazoo Regional Educational Services Agency. "We know what to do. We know who to partner with. We know who does what's best."

The object now, she said, is "building capacity" -- which means getting money to serve as many children as possible.

That's the mission of Brown, who met with Rice on Friday.

She wants to tap local philanthropists and foundations to put money into three areas: creating a state-of-the-art early-childhood center that can serve as a model, funding scholarships for children to enroll in existing preschools, and providing training and support to ensure that local programs offer quality instruction.

"If Kalamazoo is going to be the Education Community, then we need to invest in early childhood," said Brown, who now will work toward organizing a group to develop a master plan and getting the seed money for the initial efforts.
"We don't need more studies. We just need to do it."

Access and quality

The big issues in preschool are access and quality.

Kalamazoo County has about 6,000 3- and 4-year-olds. About half attend preschool, including those in programs that Carambula terms "glorified baby-sitting."

In fact, any Michigan child-care facility can call itself a preschool. The only regulations for private programs are the health and safety rules applied to all day-care centers.

"I've had children who've gone to preschool and they still don't know how to write their name or have never used scissors," said Burton, the Milwood teacher.

Yet factors such as a low teacher-student ratio, having instructors trained in early-childhood education and a sound curriculum are essential to reaping any benefits from preschool, experts said.

Research indicates that high-quality programs have a positive impact on students that lasts into adulthood, while substandard preschool has no impact whatsoever.
"If it's not high quality, don't bother," Carambula said. "It's nice for the parents, but it doesn't do anything for the kids."

Improving Head Start

Current efforts to reform Kalamazoo County Head Start is viewed as a critical step in improving early-childhood services.

The federally funded program has about 600 spots for 3- and 4-year-olds who live below the poverty line. It is perhaps the most important program in the local preschool network because of its size and the fact it targets the neediest preschoolers.

On paper, it's an ideal program, one that includes a range of social services for parents.

"It recognizes that you need to do both classroom work and have other things that go with it" when serving low-income children, Kalamazoo County Administrator Peter Battani said.

Yet Battani acknowledges that poor administration has undermined the effectiveness of the Kalamazoo County Head Start program. Last year, after a federal audit indicated that Head Start students were not receiving mandated medical services, the county's Head Start administrators departed through resignations, retirements and terminations.

What happening now, Battani said, is a complete rethinking of the program.
"We're asking ourselves, what do we need to do? How do we make better partners? What do we need to do to have better alignment with school districts?" said Linda Vail Buzas, director of Kalamazoo County Health and Community Services, which oversees Head Start.

County officials are in the midst of hiring a new Head Start director and are talking to people such as Rice and Carambula about what reforms are needed. That includes working closer with local school districts on curriculum development and teacher training. More partnerships could also help resolve Head Start's constant scramble for space and the issues associated with locating Head Start classrooms in sites where teachers work in isolation, with minimal supervision and support.

"I think, fundamentally, we've got good staff and the core of a good program," Battani said. "But we've also got a lot of issues we need to work out."

He said his goal is to develop "the best Head Start program in the country."

"It's a worthy goal," Carambula said. "I'm hopeful.

"A lot depends on the talent they bring in, whether they can get a leadership team that can set the vision and make it happen."

Model program

A government-funded preschool that gets high marks is the Michigan School Readiness Program, where the state pays for school districts to serve at-risk 4-year-olds who do not qualify for Head Start.

There are almost 600 Kalamazoo County children in the state program, which goes by different names in different school districts -- it's PEEP, for instance, in Kalamazoo Public Schools, and PREP in the Parchment School District.

"When I talk to superintendents, the Michigan School Readiness Program is the one program that they don't want the state to change," Fuller said.

The state program has several advantages over Head Start and many private programs. Teachers in the program must have a bachelor's degree in early childhood education; the pay is enough to attract the best candidates, and the curriculum is specially geared for school readiness. Moreover, having a preschool in an elementary school puts the preschool students, parents and teachers in a setting with additional support and resources.

A 2004 study by Rutgers University found that Michigan School Readiness Program students showed "significant" improvement in vocabulary, literacy and mathematical development. For instance, the students showed a 117 percent gain in literacy skills compared to 4-year-olds who were not in the program.

Students in the program come to kindergarten "knowing what school is about," said Maureen Kostecki, kindergarten teacher at Parchment Central Elementary School. "They know they're here to learn."

Looking ahead

Kostecki and others would like to see the Michigan School Readiness Program enroll kids starting at age 3 and expanded to serve every Michigan child. But with the state's budget woes, most concede it seems unlikely such funding would come from Lansing.

More federal funding is a possibility, however. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidates, have endorsed the need for universal preschool. People such as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke also said expanding preschool makes sense.

Tim Bartik, a KPS trustee and economist who is writing a book about preschool, estimates universal, high-quality preschool would cost the United States between $15 billion and $25 billion a year.

"The cost isn't trivial," Bartik said. "But it could be done if there's the political will to do it. ... Under a Republican president, you got a drug plan for seniors that cost a lot more than $20 billion."

Although universal preschool is "not a panacea, particularly if you don't have parent education leading up to it," Carambula said, she and others say the benefits would be substantial.

"You look at the children who comes into our schools and where they are, and it's clear they need much more and they need it earlier," said Rice, the KPS superintendent.

"The only question is when you're going to deal with kids. You can deal with their needs in a profound way when they're 3, 4 and 5. Or you can wait until they're 16 or 17, or 25 and 26, and they need to be incarcerated at an extraordinary cost," Rice said. "You have to view preschool not as a cost, but as an investment."